Via beamish down in comments somewhere, and via my dad (sorta), some bohemian Muppets.
Oh, Holbo. I know you’re not baiting me, but it feels like you are.
John has a problem that everyone who has to teach history of early modern has to face. The standard story explains 17th and 18th century philosophy as a debate between two epistemological factions. The rationalists Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz meet the empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the octagon! Who will emerge victorious? KANT! Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
The virtues of the standard story are these. Having a narrative that unites the whole period and builds towards contemporary thought helps give a survey course some thematic unity, which is important given the difficulty of the readings. It’s also the standard story that almost every practicing philosopher has encountered, which makes it both very easy to teach and the conservative option. Given that the students are almost certainly going to forget about most of the particulars after the final exam, if they’re left with a vague idea that Descartes is like the Matrix and Hume is like modern science and Kant said something but damned if I was doing the reading a week before finals, there’s not too much harm done.
The vice of the standard story is that it’s false. As Holbo notes, Descartes’ philosophy, far from springing full-born from the head of Socrates, has much in common with the musty medieval theologians he criticizes. None of the rationalists shunned empirical study, and the empiricists include Berkeley (which always struck me as a stretch of the framework.) Making the whole period about warring factions in epistemology also means that certain writings of the moderns that don’t fit easily into that framework tend to get ignored.
So, Holbo’s solution: frame the class on “Everything I Am Supposed To Teach You About [Early Modern Philosopher] is Wrong”, and mix contemporary treatments of similar problems into the early modern syllabus. He asks for inexpensive reading suggestions.
My criticisms and suggestions, mostly constructive but not sparing the snark, after the jump.
In a funny coincidence, Eid al Adha (the commemoration of Ibrahim/Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son) falls on Friday this year, which means that Thursday is the day of Arafat. And that’s a big day for fasting for people not on the pilgrimage. Not mandatory, but extra-supererogatory.
So, this should be a fun Thanksgiving! Fast starts about quarter to six in the morning and ends about quarter to five in the evening. Good times. Actually pretty light compared to the longer days of Ramadan, but still, I’ll take any excuse to whine.
Eid al Adha doesn’t have presents like Eid al Fitr does, but it does involve goat sacrifice (the meat is donated to the poor). Decadent western types like myself just have it done via various charities (that way I can designate the donation for places I’m feeling particularly bad about) but old-school guys will go to the farm and do their own cutting. I’ll take some pictures if I work up the guts to get my hands dirty.
Does this (here and here) happen often? Does the Times often review the same book twice? I can’t think of another instance like this, I have to admit, but I don’t pay much attention to the Sunday Book Review anymore, so I can’t say for certain.
Regardless, in this case, if you don’t feel like clicking on links, the book in question is Sir John Keegan’s The American Civil War: A Military History. Which book, I should say, I haven’t read and won’t be reading. And not just because the second review linked above, authored by the normally genial James McPherson, savages Keegan’s efforts as terribly sloppy, but also because, coincidentally, just last week Eric and I taught Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler in our graduate seminar.
So much wrong in such a short paragraph:
Students at University of California schools have been protesting the decision of the Board of Regents “to raise undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — 32 percent next fall.” But higher tuition, if it is accompanied with higher financial aid for lower- and middle-income students, improves equity
This, the start of a longer article by Ian Ayres at the Freakonomics blog of the New York Times, continues the argument about equity and tuition to reach triumphantly the conclusion that “By increasing the effective tuition for some of our wealthier students, we might be able to reduce the price for some of the less wealthy.” In other words, the tuition raise could be a good thing.
Reading it, I boggled. It’s a particular kind of context-and-responsibility-free analysis, shorn of everything except the preconceptions and assumptions of a particular discipline, that actively reduces the quality of the debate by giving one position the cover of a seemingly scholarly analysis. Is it likely that California, in the midst of a massively catastrophic fiscal situation, with a horrendously dysfunctional state government, will raise the amount of financial aid for state students? Or that the federal government, also facing serious fiscal issues and with a certain level of dysfunction of its own, will step into that absence?
Really?
So essentially, the argument is that the tuition raise might be a good thing if this almost certainly impossible thing happens along with it. That’s not reasoning, that’s “and a pony” logic.
That’s not even considering the myriad other problems with the argument. Is it possible that there could be other definitions of equity rather than economic that a university might be seeking with low up-front tuition? Is it possible that the lower-income students might be thrown off by the intimidation factor of high up-front price and simply not apply at all? Is it possible that having high tuitions at the state colleges in California will further erode the sense of ownership that Californians have in their state system and lead to a continuing spiral of budget cuts and tuition increases? I don’t know, but I rather suspect that all of those issues are worth considering.
Also worth considering is the idea that those who are public voices simply because of their reputation for acuity would do well to live up to that reputation.
I wish for that, and a pony.
I’m surely taking the wrong lesson from this story of the self-unmasking of blogger and call girl Belle du Jour, who turned out to be Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a cancer researcher.
The lesson we’re supposed to take and the debate we’re supposed to have of course is the endless one about prostitution, criminality, and class, and Dr. Magnanti’s story is well worth reading for its discussion of all of those things. But what caught my eye was the following:
I couldn’t find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn’t have my PhD yet.
Mom! I swear I thought adjuncting was the worst that could happen!
I’m also concerned that the APA will get wind of this, realize that it wouldn’t even have to change its acronym, and add new advertisements to the Jobs for Philosophers pamphlet in a down economy.
furlough (“a temporary leave of absence, as from military duty”): from the unpaid furloughs that many employers gave to workers to weather the recession
Merriam-Webster picks its words of the year based on how often people search for them. Rather wonderfully, the words that draw curious people to the dictionary almost all match up with major news stories.
This strikes me as an obvious variant of the “Chinese curse”: “May your predicament bring lexicographers business.”
Kevin Drum on the 32% rise in student fees approved by UC Regents.
The chart … shows an almost ghostly parallel: adjusted for inflation, UC tuition has gone up 5x since 1980. During the same period, spending on corrections has also gone up 5x. As we spend ever more on warehousing prisoners, we’re forced to make students pay ever more for their education. The two lines track almost exactly.
We used to have the world’s greatest system of higher education and we thrived. Now we have the world’s biggest system of penal institutions and we’re broke. That’s the decision Californians have made over the past 30 years: more prisons and better paid prison guards, but lower taxes and less education. (And not just higher education, either.) It’s hard to think of a stupider allocation of resources. But hey — at least our property taxes are capped! Hooray!
A young woman in one of my classes stopped by my office yesterday to interview me, an assignment from the pre-med sorority (Really? There are such things?) she’s pledging. In the course of our chat, she asked me about hobbies, and I admitted that I don’t really have any and haven’t since my kids were born.
My typical day, I explained, goes something like this: I rise with the sun, spend a bit of time with my family, take the older boy to school, trundle off to work, embrace the life of the mind for a few hours, head home at day’s end, spend a bit more time with my family, get the kids to sleep, read a bit (usually something related to work) or write for awhile, and then fall into the fitful slumber of the middle-aged, knowing that I’ll do it all again the next day. The excitement never ends.
She seemed somewhat horrified by this and wasn’t entirely convinced when I revealed that I’m actually quite happy with my life (“life”?). Even still, she wouldn’t let it go, insisting that I must have had hobbies once upon a time. So I reassured her that, yes, I used to ride my bike a lot, read novels, go to the movies, and listen to the latest record albums. (Which reminds me, I know I’m late to the party, but Fleet Foxes ftw.) In the end, the whole conversation was quite pleasant, but it was also a useful reminder that, although I share time with with my students in class each week, I have very little in common with most of them.
So I’m currently suffering my way through Sarah Palin’s book, in a style not altogether dissimilar to Jesus’ ordeal in the hands of the Roman Empire. I won’t pollute the air around here with too many details from the book, but I was amused to see that my former governor repeats the cherished myth that Americans mocked 19th century maverick William Seward for writing a Facebook note about “death panels” arranging the purchase of Alaska in 1867.
Critics ridiculed Seward for spending so much on a remote chunk of earth that some thought of as just a frozen, inhospitable wilderness that was dark half the year. The $7.2 million purchas became known as “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’ Icebox.” Seward withstood the mocking and disdain because of his vision for Alaska. He knew her potential to help secure the nation with her resources and strategic position on the globe. . . . [D]ecades later, he was posthumously vindicated, as purveyors of unpopular common sense often are.
As Richard Welch pointed out more than a half century ago in the pages of the American Slavic and East European Review — a title that I’ll concede is likely not a part of Sarah Palin’s titanic reading list — the “Seward’s Folly” narrative has very little evidence to support it. Americans in fact knew quite a bit about the Russian territory prior to its purchase. Anyone connected to the whaling and fishing industries of New England, or to the West Coast fur trade, would have understood the potential value of securing Alaska; anyone who appreciated the value of thwarting British ambitions to round out their Canadian empire would have been pleased as well. (This would have included those Americans who still subscribed to Polkian-era fantasies about capturing British Columbia up to the 54th parallel. With the purchase of Alaska, the westernmost British possessions were now in “an American vice,” as Seattle’s Puget Sound Gazette theorized.) Moreover, there was a great deal of emerging scientific literature on the territory, with recent expeditions funded by Smithsonian Institute as well as by other public and private backers.
So far as public opinion was concerned, most newspapers actually supported the purchase. The major exception was the New York Tribune, which was owned by Horace Greeley, a Republican who was nevertheless one of William Seward’s avowed enemies. (Greeley believed Seward had been too radical on the slavery issue, among other things). Even Democratically-aligned papers in the North — while not missing the opportunity to crack wise about polar bears and walruses — tended to support the purchase, mainly because there was no compelling reason to oppose it. And at the end of the day, the treaty with Russia passed the US Senate by a vote of 37-2, with no significant expressions of opposition during the floor debate.
What’s odd — or not, depending on what view you take of Palin’s intelligence — is that most educated Alaskans are aware of all this, at least in its broad outline. It’s taught in the schools, and the few textbooks that have been written about Alaskan history all incorporate Wright’s findings into their treatment of the Alaskan purchase. Certainly someone who claims to know and love the state as much as the abdicated governor does should know that the “Seward’s Folly” myth survives because most people outside the state know very little about Alaska and are perfectly comfortable substituting fable for fact when thinking about its history, culture and geography. But since Sarah Palin’s entire schtick requires an audience that believes the myth — that believes, for example, that we can drill the shit out of the state without wrecking its ecology — I’m not surprised that she believes it as well. It’s certainly not the only bit of nonsense she’s peddling, but it’s a revealing bit at that.
…As an added bonus, Palin describes William Seward as just the sort of “colorful” character — like Soapy Smith and Skookum Jim Mason — that the Alaskan territory attracted. I don’t think anyone has ever described Seward as “colorful,” but I’m going to assume that Palin is actually thinking of William Seward Burroughs, whose fondness for guns and drugs would indeed have suited him well for an authentic Alaskan life.
Kevin Drum writes,
But look: isn’t secular holiday music something we can all agree on? I mean, it sucks. It really does.
No, we can’t agree on that, you big square Grinch. Top of the list of things I would rather hear than a moany Muzak version of “Adeste Fidelis” is going to include the following, but most of all Mitch Benn’s “True Meaning of Christmas” and other songs, here.
Not to mention
From the Public Policy Institute of California’s survey conducted October 20-November 3 on Californians and higher education:
Despite significant budget cuts in higher education, at least six in 10 Californians give good to excellent marks to the California Community College (13% excellent, 52% good), California State University (9% excellent, 52% good) and University of California (13% excellent, 49% good) systems. These grades are nearly as high as they were in 2007 and 2008, when about two in three Californians gave positive ratings to the three branches. Today, parents of California college students, current students, and alumni give the state’s higher education institutions similarly high grades.
But residents have little confidence in the state elected officials who have authority over California colleges and universities. Californians give Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a 28 percent overall approval rating that matches his record low in July 2009. They give the legislature an overall approval rating of 18 percent, near its record low (17%) from July. State leaders get even lower ratings for their handling of higher education: 21 percent for Schwarzenegger and 16 percent for the legislature. Both are new lows. And most Californians have very little (37%) or no (20%) confidence in state government’s ability to plan for the future of the higher education system (8% have a great deal of confidence, 33% only some).
“Californians hold their colleges and universities in high esteem,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO. “But they’re worried about what’s going to happen next. They’re struggling with a crisis in the economy and a crisis of confidence in their leaders.”
If de-emphasizing intercollegiate athletics is one of the ancillary effects of the economic crisis gripping college campuses around the country, my sense is that would very likely be a good thing. And I don’t just mean at the highest level, at those places like my first employer, the University of Oklahoma, where the athletic department provides de facto minor league teams for NFL and NBA franchises, but also at institutions like UC Davis, where the school’s move to Division I seems like an unmitigated disaster. And so, as we’re being asked to make budget cuts deep enough that we’re going to see the glint of bone now and again, we should insist that fielding teams capable of competing for national championships, at least in so-called revenue sports, shouldn’t be part of a university’s core mission.
For some reason I feel like I should note that I rowed crew — I stunk — at the University of Wisconsin for two years and that I remain a somewhat passionate fan of college sports. This caveat, I suppose, is the equivalent of foregrounding my Judaism before criticizing Israel. Don’t hate me, jocks, I’m one of you!
The Council of UC Faculty Associations’ website runs this graph (click on it to see it full size).
The author explains that he uses Management and Senior Professionals and Senior Management Group FTE data from UCOP.
I was going to title this post “When it was good,” but there’s so much juicy Time-ese in here that I had to cut off a slice for the headline. Anyway, this is how the press used to talk about the California Master Plan. So many lines here read in retrospect like such knowing predictions it makes me want to cry.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Legislative Analyst’s Office has a report on the California Master Plan at fifty, or nearly fifty—guess they figured they’d better hurry, the MP might not outlast forty-nine, the way things are going. Some key conclusions:
Key higher education funding decisions have been made without the benefit of clear state policy guidance. For example, the state has no formal policy to guide the setting of student fees at the public colleges and universities. As a result, fee levels have been unpredictable and volatile, with little alignment to the cost of instruction or to students’ ability to pay. Similarly, the state lacks a policy for funding enrollment growth at the public universities. For the past several years, the state budget has not specified any particular enrollment level at the universities, instead allowing the universities’ governing boards to decide for themselves how much enrollment to support with their funding. Moreover, there is not even consensus among state policymakers as to what it does or should cost to educate a university student.
The state’s Cal Grant financial aid programs have been somewhat more consistently funded, generally adhering to statutory eligibility criteria and fully covering educational fees for students at public institutions. However, the state’s ability to meet these commitments has been threatened as the Governor and others have sought to reduce or even eliminate Cal Grant benefits as a way to address the state’s budget deficit. Moreover, recent state budgets have departed from statutory guidelines for setting Cal Grant levels for students at nonpublic institutions.
Some components of the state’s higher education apparatus have also declined or are under threat of elimination. For example, the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC)—the state agency charged with coordinating the state’s higher education efforts—saw its budget and staffing reduced by almost half in 2003, and several past and current bills have sought to eliminate or radically change the commission. Meanwhile, a state law that provided for regulation of for–profit private colleges was allowed to expire, leaving these colleges to operate without state oversight for over two years. (Legislation was passed in fall 2009 that would establish a new regulatory bureau and framework for 2010.)
Finally, demographic changes have altered the types of higher education challenges the state faces. At the time of the Master Plan’s adoption, the state sought to contend with an anticipated “tidal wave” of students seeking access to higher education. Today, the state is facing projected shortages of college graduates and is seeking ways to increase college enrollment. At the same time, incoming students are less prepared for college, resulting in college completion rates far lower than they were 50 years ago.
Overall, the state’s vision for its higher education system is less cohesive than it was a half century ago. There is little methodical state oversight and planning, and the linkage between state budget decisions and policy goals is weak. Instead, the individual segments of higher education are largely left to develop their own policies according to their own priorities, with little guidance from state policymakers.
There supposed to be a new plan, maybe in time for Christmas.
Anthony Portantino, D-La Cañada Flintridge (Los Angeles County), who chairs the Assembly Higher Education Committee, said those conversations have already begun in preparation for hearings on overhauling the Master Plan, possibly in December.
“California has dramatically changed in 50 years,” Portantino said. “We need to make sure the promises made are kept.”
Ricardo Gomez of the UC Student Association agrees. But the Cal undergrad is skeptical that conversations and hearings will change the fundamental problem.
“We’ve been lobbying legislators for years telling them that UC is not living up to the Master Plan,” said Gomez, legislative affairs chair for the association.
“We can talk about innovative solutions, but at the end of the day it comes down to fully funding higher education,” he said. “The state needs to increase its revenues.”
Drastic times call for (at least talking about considering) drastic measures.
“I looked as hard as I could at how states could declare bankruptcy,” said Michael Genest, director of the California Department of Finance who is stepping down at the end of the year. “I literally looked at the federal constitution to see if there was a way for states to return to territory status.”
There were no bankruptcy options, and the legislature chose to cut back sharply on education and health care to fill the gap.
Perhaps California could secede, and then hope that as part of the inevitable defeat and reconstruction that the federal government would force us to write a proper constitution! Have we considered that?
Seriously, though, what does it mean—this is not a rhetorical question, I’d really like to know and don’t have an answer—when it seems more plausible to engage in constitutional shenanigans than to, for example, restore the vehicle licensing fee to its full former level, and other measures of that sort?
Back when I was in grad school, lots of people were buzzing about Foucault.* But the really hip kids were deep into Walter Benjamin. And being hip**, I hopped on the bandwagon and never jumped off. Benjamin’s work has become especially important for me recently, as I’ve tried to finish my book on the politics of memory surrounding the Sand Creek massacre. Which is all just a long way of pointing out that Terry Eagleton’s study of Benjamin has been re-released (though maybe not in the States). Regardless, it’s worth a read. And now, having said all of that, I find myself wondering: which theorists are the kewl kidz*** reading these days?
* Yes, I’m that old. And also washed-up, but that’s a story for another day.
** Well, not really. But some of my best friends were Europeanists.
*** I know, I know, historians can never really be kewl kidz. Except for Marc Bloch, bitchez, who was kewler than Elvis and Beeker combined.
Michael Bérubé says if you don’t watch this video, he “will come to your house—and you don’t want that.”
Now, in my experience Michael is a perfectly delightful guest, so I don’t know how much of a threat this is. At most I expect he might give you a special JoePa-chair head-slap, and urge you to roll up your pant legs.
But you get the point.
Previously.
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